Forcibly seize? Who's forcibly seizing anything? Everyone has to pay taxes. [b]Everyone[/b]. Running a government isn't cheap. Using fictitious numbers here, a 10% tax on someone who makes $1,000 a month means a lot more to them than a 10% tax on someone who makes $100,000 a month. We're (theoretically) talking the ability to pay rent vs the ability to stay in a 5-star hotel for a week.

By definition taxes are taken from people under threat of government force thus forcibly seized. While taxes are necessairy to fund government they would ideally be as low a possible to fund only those things that are absolutely necessairy. Such as infrastructure and national defense.

You get out what you put in. If only the bare minimum is paid in taxes, our country cannot improve. We pay more than what is required for upkeep so that (theoretically) our education system, infrastructure, and national defense can be improved. The problem comes when congressmen and women use that money to pad their pockets instead of getting anything done. For example, they voted to raise their own incomes while denying a raise in social security benefits for cost-of-living increases.

But we don't get back what we put in ever. Government is by nature inefficient. You gave education as an example so I will use it as well. The US spends more per child on education then most other countries and yet we fall behind them in test scores. http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/education-at-a-glance-2014_eag-2014-en#page206 Pg. 206 for source. You assume that government must provide these things but truthfully social security could be replaced by private retirement accounts (ira) and private schools already exist with a higher standard and lower cost per student.

I would say a large part of the education issue is how things are taught (*cough* common core *cough*). The emphasis on testing forces students to temporarily memorize specific facts to pass, instead of actually [b]learning[/b] the content.